Just like what I said already on my previous articles, the goal of the search engines is to provide relevant result on every queries made by the internet users. Engineers behind the search engines wrote algorithms which are responsible in indexing websites and returning the list of webpages as the result in every searches made through the search engine.
From time to time, search engines became more popular. (Should I say, search engine is now the most popular tool in finding information from the internet.)
Webmasters (including bloggers) on the other hand realized how important is the search engine in getting traffic for their websites or blogs. Almost all internet users use search engine in searching for the information they’re looking for. And those webpages listed at the top of the list at the result page are those that are most likely visited by the internet users.
So, webmasters studied how the search engines rank webpages at the search engine result pages. After learning the secrets of these search engines, they then optimized their websites or blogs so that the webpages of their websites or blogs will be listed at the top at the search engine result pages.
Because of the competition in getting the higher rank at the search engine result pages, some webmasters or bloggers use tricks to win the top position of the SERP. This trick is called as the “Black Hat SEO“.
Black Hat SEO really embarrass the engineers behind the search engines because people practicing Black Hat SEO are gaming the algorithm of the search engines. So, to retain the high quality and relevancy of the search engine results, the algorithm of the search engine has been modified so that those who gamed it would be penalized and would never be included on the SERP, if not, the page rank weight of the webpages of their websites or blogs would be lessen.
So, to make it short, search engines penalize websites that violates the existing policies and guidelines imposed by the search engines.
What are the techniques that can cause the penalty? Among the search engines that I knew (ie Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc), I think only the Google search engine is strictly penalizing websites.
Ex: John Chow’s blog is under the penalty imposed by Google search engine but it’s not penalized in Yahoo search engine.
According to Matt Cutts, one of the engineers of Google, any techniques that manipulates the PageRank and the page rank at the search engine result will lead to being penalized by the search engine.
These technique are:
- Link Exchange.
- Link Buying without “nofollow” tag.
- Link Selling without “nofollow” tag.
- Creating Fake Network of Blogs. Some webmasters create several blogs from the free blogging hosts like blogger.com, wordpress.com, blogsome.com, etc. Then all these blogs are linking to the real blog.
- Keyword Stuffing. Flooding each webpages with keywords.
- Linking to Bad websites.
- Cloaking. Configuring the webpage so that the content seen by the Search engine is different to what the users have seen.
- Hidden Texts and Hidden Links in your blog’s webpages.
